To help people better understand how StreetView works, Google has launched a new site that has a lot of information about the service. The site explains how they collect the imagery, how long it takes to process it, the areas of the world that are covered, etc.

It’s probably not overly exciting for most readers of this blog, but it’ll be a great place to point people that have questions about how it all works.

This certainly makes StreetView even better — full screen mode! When viewing anything in StreetView, simply click the small grey icon in the upper-right corner (next to the “x”) and it will go full screen.

Sorry for being so quiet lately. I’ve got a few big projects going on and I’ve been away from the Google Earth scene for a few days. However, things have been very active and there’s quite a lot to see!

More Historical Imagery — Google has added more historical imagery to Google Earth. This is an awesome new feature in Google Earth 5.0, and it’s great that they’re continuing to add more data to it.

A great lesson about Google Earth imagery — Like Frank, I often talk to people that assume Google Earth imagery is real-time, or at least close to it. As you probably know, that’s far from accurate. It takes quite a lot of work to get imagery into Google Earth, and this article does a great job of explaining it.

As reported by Google Maps Mania, Norc has just launched a StreetView-like service for a handful of countries in Europe. They use the Google Maps API to power their product, then drop in a bunch of interactive panoramic images. You can’t move up up down streets quite as easily, but they provide small arrows in the corner to direct you to nearby paroramas, which are often just a few feet away (like StreetView).

I downloaded Windows 7 on my laptop tonight (dual boot with XP) and started testing the various digital earth products. So far, so good!

Google Earth went without a hitch. It runs very well, too!

The Google Earth plug-in worked perfectly as well.

Google Maps worked, as did StreetView.

Virtual Earth installed flawlessly and worked briefly, then locked up the PC hard.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with how these programs are working with Windows 7. I had intended to say “this works, that doesn’t, etc”, but everything works (for the most part). I am very impressed with Windows 7 speed-wise, too. It’s had a few hiccups (video card didn’t want to play nice), but these apps are FLYING on this old machine.

If your calendar says December 2 (as it does for a few people already), you can now check out StreetView imagery in New Zealand. The rest of us will apparently need to wait until midnight tonight, or use a proxy server to access it (http://maps.google.co.nz/streetview). If you’re able to see it before then, please let us know.